'I’m worried': Harvard professor explains why AI technology could imperil democracy in the future

01 May 2023

When President Joe Biden officially announced, on Tuesday, April 25, that he was seeking reelection in 2024, the Republican National Committee (RNC) immediately responded with a melodramatic attack ad. Many Democrats and their allies, meanwhile, rallied around Biden. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, was quick to voice his support for Biden's reelection campaign and gave him an enthusiastic endorsement.

In 2020, Sanders fought Biden aggressively for the Democratic presidential nomination before ultimately dropping out of the race and endorsing him; in 2023, Sanders wasted no time assuring Democrats that he will do everything he can to "make sure that the president is reelected.”

The RNC, in its anti-Biden attack ad, used artificial intelligence (AI) software to create dystopian images depicting what they claim a second Biden term would be like. With ominous music playing, the ad recites headlines of the future: "An emboldened China invades Taiwan. Financial markets are in freefall as 500 regional banks have shuttered their doors. Border agents were overrun by a surge of 80,000 illegals yesterday evening…. It feels like the train is coming off the tracks."

Democratic strategist Sam Cornale slammed the ad as corny and pathetic, tweeting, "When your operative class has been decimated, and you're following MAGA Republicans off a cliff, I suppose you have no choice but to ask AI to help." And the Washington Monthly's Bill Scher tweeted that it was a "very weird choice to go after an incumbent with fictional depictions of the future instead of problems in the present."

Never Trump conservative Charlie Sykes, in a column published by The Bulwark on April 26, describes the RNC ad as "bizarre."

"The GOP responded with an ad filled with made-up horribles that had not actually happened," Sykes observes. "Let's stipulate that Biden has a number of vulnerabilities, including inflation, the border, crime, etc. Some bad stuff, Afghanistan, has happened on his watch. There has been a lot of spending. But instead of focusing on that real stuff, our Joe Perticone reported yesterday, the Republican National Committee went with an artificial intelligence-generated video filled with 'disaster scenarios they believe could befall the country if Biden wins another term — things like China invading Taiwan, financial markets going into 'freefall,' border agents being 'overrun by a surge of 80,000 illegals,' and, bizarrely, San Francisco being 'closed' because of drugs and crime. That last hypothetical includes an image of a cigarette-smoking man with MS-13 tattooed in gothic script across his forehead. Subtle, the ad is not.'"

But for all the mockery the RNC's ad has received, AI is a technology that worries many defenders of democracy — who fear that artificially generated images will be convincing enough to fool and deceive voters in the future. But for all the mockery the RNC's ad has received, AI is a technology that worries many defenders of democracy — who fear that artificially generated images will be convincing enough to fool and deceive voters in the future.

Danielle Allen, a professor of politics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts outside Boston, examines that subject in an op-ed published by the Washington Post on April 26 — and lays out some reasons why she's "worried."

"Tech and democracy are not friends right now," Allen warns. "We need to change that — fast…. Social media has already knocked a pillar out from under our democratic institutions by making it exceptionally easy for people with extreme views to connect and coordinate. The designers of the Constitution thought geographic dispersal would put a brake on the potential power of dangerous factions, but people no longer need to go through political representatives to get their views into the public sphere…. Now, here comes generative artificial intelligence, a tool that will help bad actors further accelerate the spread of misinformation."

Allen stresses that she isn't opposed to AI per se. Rather, the Harvard professor argues that the tech industry needs to be proactive in making sure it isn't used to undermine democracy.

"A healthy democracy could govern this new technology and put it to good use in countless ways," Allen explains. "It would also develop defenses against those who put it to adversarial use. And it would look ahead to probable economic transformation and begin to lay out plans to navigate what will be a rapid and startling set of transitions. But is our democracy ready to address these governance challenges? I’m worried about the answer to that."

Read Danielle Allen's full Washington Post op-ed at this link (subscription required) and Charlie Sykes' full Bulwark column at this link.

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